Mangan’s blog still disappeared

We’re now in the fourth day since Dennis Mangan’s blog with all its contents was removed from the Web, with no more explanation than this impenetrable Kafkaesque announcement worthy of Eastern Europe under the Communists:

Blog has been removed

Sorry, the blog at mangans.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.

Did you expect to see your blog here? See: ‘I can’t find my blog on the Web, where is it?

I said to Dennis yesterday, isn’t there some way he can directly reach the company and find out what has happened. But I haven’t heard back from him. It passes belief that they apparently have not responded to him or explained what happened to his site.

In a thoughtful entry about Blogger’s attack on Mangan, Rick Darby writes:

Blogger is a carrier. It is protected by legal language six ways from Sunday against liability. It is no more responsible for what someone writes and transmits through it than the phone company is responsible for what you say in a phone conversation.

I again urge right wing bloggers who use the Blogger program to back up their sites and start looking at ways to move to a different platform. What happened to Mangan could happen to anyone. And, as Darby points out, Mangan’s site, which is moderated, is much more moderate in tone than many other sites.

Update:

Half Sigma, who posted another e-mail from Dennis Mangan yesterday, has some good advice. He wrote yesterday:

I would suggest that Dennis switch over to Typepad. There’s no link on top of your blog making it easy for people to report you. In the few cases in which Typepad has enacted censorship, it has been done on individual blog posts, and they inform the blog author what the problem was. There has been no case I know of in which Typepad has deleted an entire blog without warning, something which Google routinely does. I guess you get what you pay for.

You should also register your own domain name, so if your blogging service is turned off, you still own the domain and can host the same domain name somewhere else.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2009 11:58 AM | Send